Eat Your Vegetables Cookbook Giveaway!

Photo credit: Matt Armendariz

“Joe Yonan is a kindred spirit; he too is a meat lover who’s embarked on a vegetable-forward adventure and made more room for plants on the plate. But he’s done much more in Eat Your Vegetables: Joe invites us along for a delicious ride that includes the highs and lows of edible gardening and the joy of cooking for one (with smart, practical tips for managing leftovers and minimizing food waste), wrapped in an impassioned plea to get off the couch and—yes!—into the kitchen.” 

—Kim O’Donnel, author of The Meat Lover’s Meatless Celebrations and The Meat Lover’s Meatless Cookbook

An increasing number of people are showing interest in plant-based meals, some for the nutritional benefit, some looking to add a sustainable practice and others in search of economic value. Eat Your Vegetables by Joe Yonan, is the perfect book for anyone looking to expand their produce-based culinary repertoire. Yonan’s friendly voice and straight forward cooking style empowers both the home cook and the experienced vegetarian chef to be bold and pursue their vegetable-centric interest, even if the pursuit only yields a single serving.

 Spicy Kale Salad with Miso-Mushroom Omelet (Photo credit: Matt Armendariz)

“It's been my ongoing mission to get single folks - 31 million of us in the United States alone - to realize that cooking for ourselves, despite the obstacles, is a worthwhile, satisfying, potentially meditative, possibly invigorating, and maybe even delightful endeavor."

 — Joe Yonan Eat Your Vegetables

This book is filled with 80 inspired vegetarian, vegan, and flexitarian recipes such as Spicy Kale Salad with Miso-Mushroom Omelet, Thai-Style Kabocha Squash and Tofu Curry, and a One Peach Crisp with Cardamom and Honey. In addition to these out-of-the-box recipes, look for the everyday tips on shopping, storing, and salvaging leftover ingredients. 

Joe in the Garden (Photo credit: Sarah Gillinhham-Ryan)

Joe Yonan is the Food and Travel editor for the Washington Post, where he writes regular features, including the “Weeknight Vegetarian” column. He is the author of Serve Yourself: Nightly Adventures in Cooking for One , which Serious Eats called “truly thoughtful, useful, and incredibly delicious.” Yonan has won awards for writing and editing from the James Beard Foundation, the Association of Food Journalists, and the Society of American Travel Writers, and his work has been featured three times in the Best Food Writing Anthology.

  

 We're so happy to have a copy of this amazing

book to give away to one of you!

Here's How to Enter –

To win a copy of Eat Your Vegetables, simply leave a comment below answering this question by Tuesday, March 4, 2014 (one entry per person please).

 What is your go-to food item when cooking for one?

No purchase required. Limit one entry per person, please. Entries will close on Tuesday, March  4, 2014 at 8:00 am. Winners are chosen by Random Number Generator and announced on our blog on Tuesday, March 4, 2014.

Thank you for all the amazing comments! 
They were so wonderful that we chose TWO WINNERS!

The winners chosen at random are Darcie who said:

When I'm cooking for one, I like having my meal in a bowl. My favorite thing is to make homemade udon noodles with a spicy miso broth, poached egg, and throwing in some fresh mushrooms and spinach. I'd love more ways to incorporate veggies in my meals.

and Maritza who said:

I love Kale in soups or sauté with garlic. I also use it in juicing or smoothies. The Kale that comes in the Farm Fresh box is so fresh and delicious. I love getting my Farm Fresh box -- it's like Christmas every other Tuesday.

Congratulations Darcie and Maritza!

Thank you to Joe Yonan and Ten Speed Press.

Be sure to check out Eat Your Vegetables.

Water Worries

The weather forecast keeps predicting a little bit of rain next week only to update its projections to blue skies and sunny. Until recently, I have really been enjoying the beautiful California weather and now the farmer in me is starting to get a little concerned. The hills are still as golden as they were in the fall. The only difference is that the oak trees don’t have leaves and the livestock have continued to eat what it could of the dry grass. There are little pockets of green grass next to roads where a hose may have leaked, but that is it.

Late in the fall, we scurried to clean up our summer fields, get them mowed, disked and seeded to cover crops before the rains would stop our equipment from working in the fields. We were happy to have the dry weather then, but now those fields sit bare, with un-germinated cover crop seeds tucked into soil waiting for some moisture. On some of the fields, we laid out our solid set aluminum sprinkler pipes and irrigated them to get the cover crop up.

The harvest crews have been enjoying the dry weather. Harvesting the carrots, beets and leeks have been very easy to do, and our labor schedule has not had to account for a field too muddy to harvest.

The dry and beautiful weather has provided us with some short-term benefits, but they are quickly fading away. Our first tomato seeds are being sown into the greenhouse this week. With that action, it is hard not to think about the complete crop cycle of those little plants. One of our main sources of water is an irrigation project that collects surface water in a lake and reservoir. I just looked at their current capacity, and it is over 100,000 acre-feet of water less than it was a year ago, and last year was an allocation year.

Next week, we will come up with a plan to take care of our crops, assuming there is no irrigation water coming from the canal. The one thing we have working for us is that we sit on a healthy aquifer of groundwater that, if managed properly, will get us through this dry year. The big question is for how many more years will that aquifer need to support us? There exists the chance that February and March get really wet, but at this point, it is hard to assume that will be the case.

The Weather Tree

Here at the farm, we are always keeping close tabs on the weather. Since it is a new year, we want to invite you to track the weather along with us.  The Weather Tree consists of twelve branches to represent the twelve months of the year and each branch / month has a leaf for every day of that month.

Choose different colors to represent various weather types and color in a leaf each day - colored pencils and felt tip pens seem to work best. At the end of the year you will have a unique record of the weather in your neighborhood.

Giving Back, Thanks to You

When people think of the term "sustainable agriculture," they may think about farming organically or conserving water. When we at Farm Fresh To You think about sustainability, of course we think about how we farm, but we also believe that sustainability has to do with how we contribute to our local community and economy.

The holidays offer a time to reflect on community work and giving back. We have a strong outreach program through our CSA and farm that is integral to the sustainability work we do, and we want you to know that by subscribing to our CSA, you as our customers support our efforts in our delivery areas.

What we have to give is produce, and we give a lot of it. Last year, we donated over 100,000 pounds of produce to food banks. At the holiday time, we continue to donate bulk produce, but we also give Farm Fresh To You boxes to food banks in Northern and Southern California.

This past year, we also started working with a program called Kids Farmers Market, which gives locally grown produce directly to students at elementary schools with a high percentages of free and reduced lunch participants. It has been one of the most rewarding programs for us as a farm. Putting some Satsuma mandarins into the hands of children is about as simple as it gets. The kids get about 10lbs of produce from us and other farms to take home to their families.

Our outreach team also supports organizations focused on healthy eating, sustainable agriculture and education. This year, we have supported everything from an American Diabetes Association run to a local chicken coop tour that benefited a farm-to-school organization. We enjoy working with organizations making a difference in these areas and again, we thank you, our members, for help making our community work possible.